HOW TO MAKE ART or WRITE…

From an unpublished manuscript by David Jones, “Teach the pupil that first you make one mark on the paper.  Then you make another.  And the significance of these two marks is the relationship between them--- which is a third, invisible mark.”

                        -88-

If I was editing a book section for this week I would start with a memorial notice for Peter Esterhazy by sending you to a long review in which I discussed many of PE’s novels when such reviews were possible in big city newspapers in the US—but of course no longer: http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jun/07/books/bk-57301

And the Los Angeles Times even let me go on again with Esterhazy:

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/mar/14/books/bk-mcgonigle14

I would skip to a line in the most recent  Patrick Modiano  novel LITTLE JEWEL (Yale University Press) to be translated,   “He was still speaking to me of about Persian of the plains. It was like Finnish, he said. It was also a pleasant language to listen to.  You could hear the rustle of wind in the grasses and the murmur of waterfalls.”

       Modiano like Claude Simon is fortunate to have only had one publisher in France, but then both are French and at one time they did things differently there… both writers, so unlike in many ways, live in the constant  confusion of past-present-future…all of their books form a whole as did Kerouac come to think of it…  and while both Modiano and Simon have Nobel prizes in their cases these prizes mean nothing, really--- the prize has allowed more of Modiano to appear in English… for Claude Simon  his Nobel was met by derision in the US summed up by Isaac Singer asking, is Claude a man or a woman… and not joking, sad to say…

The lines I have quoted from Modiano’s novel concerns itself with a woman who has met a man who knows 25 languages… and she has been looking for her mother who years before just disappeared as people tend to do in Modiano’s novels and as they disappear in our own lives… why even tell you more… those sentences tell you, here is a very very good writer and no more need to be said.  

All of Modiano’s novels---how I like the repetition of his books--- are always about looking, looking and wanting to know…

They are remarkable as is Simon in that they mirror my own and how like Thomas Bernhard I hate plotted stories…! Those machines carving the world into beginning middle and end with characters introduced, developed, inter-acting and complications thrown in their way and then THE END

-24-

I was thinking of Bernhard because Laura Lindgren sent me her translation--- that word does not do justice to the beauty of the actual book itself THREE DAYS  (Blast Books)  because I had met her and Ken Swezey in the ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES on Second Street a long time ago where we were all watching THREE DAYS a documentary made by a German showing and recording  Thomas Bernhard sitting on a park bench on three days and talking, just talking.  Lindgren has made a beautifully designed book composed of artfully arranged stills from the movie, nicely printed and with a generous use of blank space to allow the reader to experience the actual said words of Bernhard, as is proper: the words of Bernhard, and it is only because of the words of Bernhard that we go to him…

 I am hardly a cheery author, no storyteller; I basically detest stories.  I am a story destroyer, I am a typical story destroyer. In my work, at the first sign of a story taking form, or if I catch sight of even a trace of a story, rising somewhere in the distance behind a mound of prose, I shoot it down.

-43-

And I would go on and ask someone to read DISPATCHES FROM MOMENTS OF CALM  by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter (Seagull Books)  which is a collaboration between the writer and artist that begins in a new year’s meeting at  Hotel Waldhaus in Sils-Marie…of course the reader and viewer recognize the place and its association with Nietzsche… the nervous words of Kluge moving so easily from Gemany to Lebanon and many other places echo the complexity of Richter who in so many ways is the only painter one can compare to Warhol--- but let me not explain that--- except I am thinking of two shows of Richter I have seen: the retrospective at the Tate years ago and another of the unveiling at MOMA of the complete series of paintings that came out of the violent deaths of Baader and Meinhof, October 18, 1977.

-7-

And I would ask for words on the interview book with  MARGUERITE DURAS  SUSPENDED PASSION by Leopoldina Pallotta delle Torre (SEAULL BOOKS)  and here is an answer to the question And how do you read?

“I read at night, until three or four in the morning.  The darkness around you adds greatly to the absolute passion that developes between you and the book.  Don’t you find hat? In a way daylight dissipates the intensity.”

Which strikes me as the perfect answer to those really stupid articles about “beach reads”, “summer reads” all invitations to mindlessness… whenever I see someone reading a book at the beach I know that is a person I would never want to talk with… newspapers and “quality magazines” are perfect beach readings…

-39-

But how I dislike the idea that a book review in a newspaper is just really as was patiently explained to me a number of times by book section editors as really being only a report of books being published,,. you are writing a book review you are not doing criticism whatever that is... and no newspaper person does criticism and remember of course that books of criticism are the first to be discarded when book collections are being narrowed down along with the biogrpahies of writers and…

-22-

I think I would want people to maybe read about a book by Ernesto Sabato  THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS… so a leap to Argentina and how did Sabato become lost in the shuffle?

                                     -57-

But there should also be books from the past to go against the idea that only the new matters…the Poundian:  news that stays news… making it new is reminding of what was/is… so SAUL’S BOOK by Paul T. Rogers, celebrated for how many times it was turned down by the so-called real publishers and then taken up as the EDITORS’ BOOK AWARD given by Pushcart Press…

The world of homosexuals on the make and I am not talking about two Dads renting a womb to have twins… obviously inspired by both CITY OF NIGHT and LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN, still holds its own and is stillcontroversial as it once was as the repression ever continues about the actual lives as in the novel:  A guy finds a guy in the bathroom of the Port Authority bus station:

….”and let him blow me for a couple of minutes until my dick finally gets hard which is when I pump back and forth like I was cumming and put it out and wipe it off fast  with some shit paper, zip myself back up and tip.  When I close the door he’s still sitting there with his dick in his hand, smiling like something really tremendous happened.  I bet he thinks I came.  Most people don’t know it but guys can fake cumming just like hooers do. All you got to do is while the guy is blowing you, you bring up a little phlegm, pull your dick out of his mouth fast and grab ahold of it and while you’re grabbing it you put the phlegm from your onto your dick head.  The phlegm looks like cum.  I guess it must taste like cum too cause I never had no complaint about it.

When you look up what happened to Rogers, the perfect literary career: only one  book and he was murdered according to the bio in Wikipedia:

On September 22, 1984, Rogers was found dead in his apartment by the superintendent of his apartment building. Two days later on September 24, charges of murder conspiracy and robbery were laid against Christopher Rogers, the author's adopted son, and Nicholas Ondrizek, a drifter who had been staying with them. The pair reportedly beat him to death with a wooden plank, and then stole his wallet and bank card. He was 48 years old at the time of his death, and according to his editor was gravely ill with cancer.

The two pleaded guilty to the charges on October 9, 1985.

SEAGULL BOOKS: The Best Publisher in English

         Seagull Books is now the publisher to go to for what is the best in world literature.  About the only other publisher of its authority is Robert Calasso’s Adelphi Editions in Italy.  Seagull’s seasonal catalogues are the first I look forward to. Of course there are other publishers, Archipelago, Open Letter, Dalkey Archive, New Directions and Two Lines  but for the breadth of their interests and the actual shape and feel of the books Seagull is in another class. 

         Of course one is curious about FSG but they seem to do fewer and fewer real books--- though in the immediate moment SUBMISSION by Michel Houellebecq and recently the ZIBALDONE by Leopardi as well as PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas--- mitigate that reservation to be sure but as far as I can tell at the moment there is nothing very much to expect of  poor Alfred Knopf at 100 years with a picture of the aged Sunny Mehta posing with another relic Patti Smith in the Wall Street Journal society page--- such is the fate…

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         Seagull Books originating in India is distributed by the University of Chicago Press---  they have German, Italian, French lists as well as books in many other fields beyond what I am mostly interested in, literature…  My shelves are filling with their books.  It is as if they have opened a delightful river of non traditional books dominated by the fragment and obsessive narrators, remembering suddenly Nicanor Parra saying to me sometime in the early 70s in  The Only Child  a bar on West 79^th Street NYC:  “to echo him: the I is always another.”  Parra did not have to mention Rimbaud and it is this sort of intelligence and understanding at work in the selecting of books and authors by Seagull and here I will list some--- and you can see by the list why--- Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Laszlo Kraznahorkai, Alexander Kluge, Pascal Quignard, Yves Bonnefoy, Hans Magus Enzenberger, Jorge Luis Borges, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch… and in the mail yesterday: PAPER COLLAGE (Selected Aphorisms and Short Prose)  by Georges Perros, drawn from three books originally in French (1960-78) from Gallimard of this recluse’s thoughts…: at random:  It’s wrong to complain. If we knew where we came from, where we are and where we are going, it would be absolute hell.

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         Pascal Quignard is a re-discovery for me as I had read now too long ago THE SALON IN WURTTEMBERG (Published when Grove Press was owned by a Getty woman and George Weidenfeld) and ALL THE WORLD’S MORNINGS… those were relatively traditional novels as Quignard at least based on the five books that Seagull has published: THE ROVING SHADOWS, THE SILENT CROSSING, ABYSSES, SEX AND TERROR, THE SEXUAL NIGHT. 

         What I treasure in Quignard is his ability to reveal my absolute ignorance and illiteracy when I attempt to compare my own memory and learning of what is in reality world literature.  His books rely upon the suggestive fragment, brief prose passages sometimes connected, often times not, ranging across the whole of world literature with a wonderfully sensuous understanding of the ancient world and in this he can only be compared to Roberto Calasso in their shared understanding that the---  like Krapp I now slam the tape machine off so as to avoid revealing my own pathetic attempt to understand either of these writers.

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Of course Quignard is not much reviewed in the US---where if you are praised by the NY Times it is a form of abuse, such is the state of newspaper reviewing--- and the same went for Ingeborg Bachmann’s WAR DIARY written as an 18 rear old as WW2 comes to an end and her affair with a British soldier who turns out to be an exile Austrian Jewish guy who eventually leaves for what will be Israel… another text adding to our understanding of the only woman one really knows from the German language as it were… and there was Max Frisch’s DRAFTS FOR A THIRD SKETCHBOOK :  “what our American friends expect: a miracle!... they want to be feared and loved at the same time.  If we don’t manage that, they see it as anti-American”… to add to the long ago published notebooks from the 70s another writer who disappeared for the most part from America…

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Here are two passages from ABYSSES  by Quignard and allow them to stand in for all the books by all the authors I have both  listed and not listed as being published by Seagull Books:

Libraries and museums took over from churches and palaces.  Sacred places where all the members of a group began to worship, gathering in silence around something neither-found- nor-lost (the fascinus of Osiris).  Societies that were increasingly religious and mythologizing, adoring themselves in the reflection of their past.  Flocks of sheep, horned animals and dreams circulating endlessly around the empty, trans-temporal envelope 

In the great age of exploration, the whole of the known world become drenched in ecclesiastical Latin---a fact we might well find astonishing.  All the more astonishing, indeed, as Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek were all more likely to have been spoken in the houses of Yeshua than the tongue of the Romans, which was merely the persecutory language of the triumphal arches and crucifixion.

                                                      93

          But I can not stop in the past--- if there is such a thing--- as Seagull has also published two books of conversations  with Jorge Luis Borges conducted by Osvaldo Ferrari in Borges 84^th year:  and the most startling in ways that seem obvious in our moment of typing and reading…  Ferrari mentions that the American landing on the moon was welcomed by Borges but the rest of the world seems to have quickly forgotten it….  This leads to a discussion that in recounting sounds pretentious  in our dumbed down times but to just list some of the proper names:  Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Eric the Red, Melville, Whitman, Berkeley, Plato, Seneca, Saint Brendan, Denis de Rougemont, Columbus…...  of course it is not… but Ferrari and Borges tease the landing out and finally Borges is asked why this great adventure is now not talked about, marveled over:  “No, one doesn’t talk about it because one talks about elections, one talks about the saddest subject of all which  is politics. It is not for the first time that I’m the enemy of the State and of States and of nationalism which is one of the blemishes of our time.  The fact that each person insists on the privilege of having been born in one or another point or corner of the planet, no?  And that we’re so far from the ancient dream of the Stoic, that time when people were defined by their city--- Thales of Miletus, Zeno of Elea, Heraclitus of Ephesus, etc, who would say that they were citizens of the world.  It would have been a scandalous paradox for the Greeks..

       Later there is an aside, “the moon of Virgil and the moon of Shakespeare were already before the discovery, no? … There’s something so intimate about the moon…There’s a line in Virgil which talks about ‘amica silentia lunae’, which refers to the brief period of darkness which allow the Greek to get down from the wooden horse and invade Troy.  But Wilde, who doubtless knew about this, prefers to talk about “the friendly silence of the moon’.  And in a line of my own, I’ve said:  “the silent friendliness of the moon/ I quote Virgil badly) accompanies you.’

                                  15

         That seems a good place to stop as you search out the Seagull books catalogue at University of Chicago Press.

         But come to think of it there is a better place—last week I read with my students in Freshman Composition 2 at BMCC  Peter Handke’s TILL DAY YOU DO PART OR A QUEST OF LIGHT (Seagull Books) in which a woman from what seems to be a Roman tombstone begins to speak and we realize it is the voice of the women mentioned in Krapp’s Last Tape… the only possible response to this great work of art where she takes issue with Krapp and what I have always enjoyed about the play when Krapp concludes:   “I can feel the fire in me now…”

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         And I could even go on to Ralf Rothmann or Patrick Roth or Annemarie Schwarzenbach--- whose life and literary works trace out the sexual frontiers that are coming to be taken for granted in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annemarie_Schwarzenbach… 

         Yet… it is a struggle to disbelieve that  it is now really all too late for such a publisher… I hope I am wrong since Seagull originating in India…maybe still has the ancient optimism from before KA---to echo Calasso...
AND A PS PS  when I went to fix some typos:  APOSTOLOFF  by Sibyl Lewitscharoff...caught my eyes across from where I am sitting--- a going to Bulgaria... and I have only scratched the surface!!!!